20. The Quiet Part
THE QUIET PART
GRACE
It's been fourteen hours since Joel's face was close enough to mine that I could count the colors in his eyes, which is two.
They're brown with a ring of darker brown near the center.
Fourteen hours since Gregory, whose sole purpose in the undead ecosystem is apparently romantic sabotage, shuffled up in his stupid fanny pack and his stupid Hawaiian shirt and ended whatever was about to happen.
Gregory is my nemesis. Gregory showed up at the exact moment when things were about to become more things and instead they became nothing because Gregory exists.
Gregory is still out there. He survived the clearing because he's the cockroach of wrong people, the one who's always somewhere else when we sweep.
I'll deal with Gregory later. Right now I'm dealing with something worse, which is the fact that Joel and I have been doing a perimeter check for the last forty minutes and neither of us has mentioned the kiss and the not-mentioning is so loud it's echoing off the fish tube.
The sharks can hear it. They're judging us.
Joel is three feet ahead of me.
The WonderSphere polo is gone. He found a button-front maintenance shirt in the supply bedroom this morning, dark blue with the park logo over one pocket, and apparently I can be emotionally compromised by more than one kind of uniform.
I watch the way his head turns slightly when he checks, scanning for threats that aren't there because nothing can get through the acrylic and Joel knows this but checks anyway because Joel is Joel and Joel doesn't trust anything he can't verify personally.
He's been doing it all day. The not-quite-looking-at-me while also definitely looking at me.
"Panel seven is holding," he says.
"Great. Love panel seven. Big fan."
He glances back at me. "You're being weird."
"I'm always weird. You said you were used to it."
"I said I was adjusting."
"Did you finish adjusting?"
"No." He turns back to the panels. "I don't think I'm going to."
We walk. The sharks swim. Lenny the sea turtle glides past unhurried, like an animal that never once stressed about a kiss because sea turtles don't have lips, or maybe they do, I don't actually know the oral anatomy of sea turtles and this isn't the time for marine biology.
"Joel."
"What."
I don't know what I was going to say. I had words. Then he turned around and looked at me and they scattered like startled fish.
"I just..." I wave my hand. The gesture that means everything and nothing. "Last night. That happened."
"It did."
"And then Gregory happened."
"Also true."
"And I've been thinking about it. Not the Gregory part. The Gregory part can rot. But the first part, the part where you..." I gesture at his mouth. At my mouth. At the space between us that feels smaller than it should be.
"The part where I kissed you," Joel says.
"Yes. That part."
"What about it?"
"I don't know. I don't have a thesis statement. I'm not presenting a research paper. I keep thinking about it and I can't stop thinking about it and my brain has like forty-seven tabs open and they're all that moment and some of them are playing audio and I can't figure out how to close them."
He's quiet. The tank hums. A shark passes overhead.
"You make the panic quiet," I say. The words come out wrong. They always come out wrong.
Joel's looking at me the way he looked at me last night, right before he kissed me. "What did you say?"
"I said..." I try to reconstruct. "I was trying to say that when I'm with you, the part of me that's waiting for the ground to reach up and grab me is quieter. You make the panic quiet."
He takes a step toward me. Then another. The distance between us halves. Halves again.
"I was trying to say you feel safe," I add, my words coming faster.
"But that's not right either because nothing is safe.
Nothing has been safe since the highway, but when I'm with you the unsafe feels survivable.
And I know that's a lot to put on someone, I know I'm being too much again, I'm always too much or not enough and there's never a middle setting for me, but I just... "
His hands come up to my face. Both of them. Palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair, holding me.
I make a sound against his mouth. Something that would be mortifying if I had the capacity for mortification right now, which I don't, because Joel is kissing me in the fish tube.
"Joel," I say, pulling back just enough to breathe. "The perimeter."
"The perimeter is fine."
"You didn't check."
"I'm checking right now." His eyes move over my face. "Perimeter looks good."
"That's not what perimeter means."
"It's what it means right now."
His tongue traces my lower lip and I open for him and then we're really kissing.
I didn't notice us moving but we must have moved because I'm against the curved wall of the tunnel now, the tank pressing cool against my shoulder blades through my hoodie, and Joel is pressing warm against my front.
His thigh slots between mine. I gasp. He swallows the sound as I rock into him.
"I've been thinking about this," he says against my mouth. "Since the first night. You fell asleep on that bench with a rain poncho for a pillow and I watched you breathe for three hours."
He pulls back. The blue light turns his eyes into something oceanic, deep and dark and full of things I can't see from the surface.
"Joel."
"Is that a no?"
"It's a yes." My hands are on his chest, and his heart is pounding against my palm. "It's been a yes since the fish tube. The first fish tube time. When you gave me the terrible protein bar and I ate the whole thing even though it tasted like compressed disappointment."
"You ate it because you were hungry."
"I ate it because you gave it to me and you were worried and I wanted you to stop worrying." I pull him closer by his shirt. "I need you to stop talking about protein bars now."
"What should I talk about instead?"
"Nothing. Talking is over. We're doing other things now."
I kiss him. Joel makes a sound in his throat that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life.
His hands move. Down from my face, along my neck, over my shoulders. They pause at the hem of my hoodie and he pulls back just enough to look at me, a question in his eyes.
"Yes," I say, before he can ask.
"You don't know what I'm asking."
"Yes anyway. Whatever the question is, the answer is yes, unless the question is 'should we invite Gregory,' in which case absolutely not."
"Grace."
"Joel, I swear to god if you ask me if I'm sure, I'm going to throw myself into the shark tank."
Joel laughs. It's the first time I've heard that sound from him. And I want to make it happen again and again and again until he forgets he was ever a person who didn't laugh.
"You're a lot," he says. "I like it."
"You do?"
His hands slip under my hoodie. Find skin. I shiver. His palms slide up my sides. Over my ribs. His thumbs brush the undersides of my breasts. I arch into his hands and my head tips back and hits the acrylic.
"Ow."
"You okay?"
"Fine. Great. The wall attacked me but I'm fine. Keep doing the thing with your hands."
He smiles against my neck. I feel the curve of his lips against my skin.
His mouth traces down my throat. Finds my collarbone.
His hands push my hoodie up and I help, pulling it over my head and tossing it somewhere, I don't care where, I don't care about anything except the way Joel is looking at me.
"You're beautiful," he says.
"You're overdressed," I counter.
His shirt comes off. I help. My fingers are clumsy on the buttons, and I miss one button twice before Joel's hands cover mine and he does it himself.
"I could have gotten it," I say.
"You were struggling."
"I was building suspense."
His chest is bare now and I put my hands on it. There's a scar on his ribs I want to ask about and I want so many things, I want them all at once.
I kiss his chest. His shoulder. The curve where his neck meets his collarbone. He makes a sound, and his hands find my waist and pull me against him. I can feel exactly how much he wants this pressing against my stomach and my knees buckle a little.
"Down," I say. "We should... there are benches. The benches are there. We should use the benches."
"The benches are five feet long."
"We'll improvise."
We move toward the bench. I trip over my own discarded hoodie. Joel catches my elbow. I sit on the bench. He stands in front of me, light framing him like a saint in a very inappropriate stained glass window.
"Come here," I say, and I reach for his belt buckle.
The belt buckle is a disaster. It's some kind of military-grade tactical nightmare, all metal and loops and mechanisms. I fumble with it. I fail. I fumble again.
"Who designed this? Who looked at this buckle and said yes, this is the buckle I want between me and my pants?"
"Here," he says, and his hands replace mine, and the buckle opens immediately because Joel's hands know how to operate things.
His pants go. I'm still on the bench, looking up at him stripped down to boxer briefs that are doing absolutely nothing to hide how much he wants this.
The line of his hips. The muscle definition that comes from years of hauling equipment and fixing things that weigh more than I do.
The trail of dark hair that starts below his navel and disappears under the waistband.
I want to follow it with my mouth and that thought makes my whole body flush hot.
"You're staring," he says.
"I'm appreciating. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Staring is rude. Appreciating is a compliment." I reach for him, hook my fingers in his waistband, and pull him closer. "I'm complimenting you, Joel. With my eyes. Aggressively."
He steps between my knees. His hands come down on either side of my head, bracing against the bench back, caging me in. "Your turn," he says.
My pants are easier than his belt. I shimmy out of them without dignity.